Odinga claims Kenya's relationship with White House cordial

CHICAGO—It was a study in contrasts for a once stalwart
American ally: There was Kenya Prime Minister Raila Odinga in Barack
Obama's hometown of Chicago last Thursday. He had been invited to speak
to a business group by the city's Council on Global Affairs.

On that very same day, as Odinga was talking up the future of
Kenya's economy in the Windy City, Tanzania President Jakaya Kikwete
was at the Oval Office meeting with President Obama—the first
African head of state to do so.

Odinga's U.S. visit also included a stop at the University of
Buffalo to address the law school, but a meeting with Obama in
Washington wasn't in the cards. It appeared to be a snub to the Kenyan
leader.

Since Obama's inauguration in January, Kenya has enjoyed the status
as the country where the new U.S. president's father was born. Odinga
himself recently claimed he's Obama's cousin, though that has not been
officially confirmed.

But all is not well with Kenya's "special relationship" with the
Obama administration. Not only was Odinga not welcomed in Washington,
even to meet a few officials, but a few days before Odinga's U.S. trip,
Obama announced that his first visit to Africa as president would be
not to Kenya, but to Ghana, a country that recently held successful
elections and had a peaceful transfer of power.

So where does that put Kenya, a longtime East Africa power player
and U.S. ally? Not in the White House; more like the dog house.

Right now, Odinga admits Kenya has some work to do to get back into
Washington's good graces. He says the relationship is "fairly
cordial."

"I don't think our relationships have deteriorated in any kind of
extent," he told GlobalPost in a sit-down interview during his Chicago
stop. He says Kenya is being advised by its "good friend" the U.S. to
"increase the pace [of reforms], otherwise there's danger coming."

Kenya's prime minister says the United States is helping with health
and food aid and the two countries are working together to stop the
piracy threat in East Africa's coastal waters.

The strained relations have been evident since the deadly riots and
street violence that took place in Kenya in late December 2007 and the
early part of 2008 in the aftermath of a presidential election gone
wrong between Odinga and incumbent President Mwai Kibaki.

Early returns and exit polls projected Odinga as the winner, but
once the election was over, Kibaki had apparently won by more than
200,000 votes, to the surprise of many local and international
observers.

That sent Odinga supporters out onto the streets to protest what
they saw as a fraudulent vote tally. In response Kibaki's military
police squads used strong-arm tactics to quell the violence.

Mayhem ensued for the next few weeks, resulting in some 1,300 people
dead and the image of Kenya — a tourist beacon with a reputation
for stability — severely tarnished.

Under international pressure to control the chaos, the two rival
politicians in February 2008 forged a power-sharing deal at the behest
of former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and then-Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice. After a few more months of haggling over the details,
Odinga was officially named prime minister in April 2008, with Kibaki
continuing as president.

But trouble may be brewing yet again in Kenya. Police and judicial
reforms have been slow to take hold, Odinga admits, and reports of
corruption by both Odinga and Kibaki are rampant.

There are also signs that the power-sharing arrangement isn't
working. Observers say the government is plagued by inertia. Odinga
complains he's being left out of the decision-making process and is
proposing structural changes that give the power to run the government
to the prime minister, with the president handling foreign policy and
defense.

"It is not that there is anything wrong with the structure that has
been introduced," says Odinga. "It is only the resistance by those that
have been there not to respect [it]."

Kibaki's contingent, for its part, has accused the Odinga crowd of
fomenting a coup, a charge Odinga himself is all too familiar with. The
son of Kenya's first post-independence vice president, Jaramogi Oginga
Odinga, the prime minister spent most of the 1980s in prison for
allegedly plotting a coup against Kenya's ruler at the time, the
dictator Daniel arap Moi.

Things have reached a point where Johnnie Carson, the former U.S.
ambassador to Kenya and now the assistant secretary of state for
African affairs, made a trip to the country earlier in May to deliver a
stern warning to the co-leaders that changes need to be made. He was
quoted in Kenya's Daily Nation saying the U.S. was "deeply
concerned and worried whether the events of the last several weeks were
again a prelude to a round of instability," adding that "political
tensions must not be allowed to turn into a political crisis, and a
political crisis must not be allowed to turn into political
violence."

Carson's words were straightforward: "We came here to warn a friend
about our concerns." It is clear that instead of letting Kenya bask in
a special glow because it is the ancestral fatherland of Obama, the new
U.S. president is showing that he knows the situation in Kenya well and
he intends to hold the country to high standards of democracy and
economic management.